The Mistressclass Read online

  You threw me crumbs, Monsieur, in those days when you replied to my letters. Tiny leftover scraps from your plate that I grovelled in front of as a Catholic kneels to receive Holy Communion. Then I fell upon them and they were gone. I gnawed at the half-eaten crusts on the floor under your table like a ravening dog. I fought other dogs for your leavings.

  Then you stopped writing to me and forbade me to write to you.

  I see no future. There is only this now, this starving imperative, this open demanding mouth silently calling your name. Yet I am supposed to have everything I need. A roof over my head, a loving husband, a devoted father, duties to keep me busy, three meals a day. How dare I say that I want more?

  But. But. I also want you, dear master. Vous me manquez. You are lacking to me. I lack you. My real self is not here in Haworth but at your side. Living abroad; with you. My real self is not this vicar’s wife, this good daughter, but that young pupil-teacher, that disciple, ardently in love with you. Writing essays and stories. Planning her novel. My real life stopped when you rejected me and got rid of me.

  I had no mother. No mother I could know or remember. I was too young when she died. No images of her that I could keep, precious treasures, in my memory. I stoppered up my child-self; all its longings. Only in reading and writing could they emerge and live freely. Only when I met you and began to love you. Then out they leaped, and they are in the world now, roaming free, genies out of their bottle; they will never go back in; they are grown too large too fierce too wild.

  I’m emptied and hollowed out by this not having; by this wanting. There is no comfort for me. Where should I find comfort in this desolate place where it rains every day and mist blots out the lane beyond the garden wall and no-one ever comes to visit us?

  Last night I dreamed of you and also I dreamed I was a girl again. I climbed into Emily’s bed and pushed myself into her arms, pressed against her thin body under the thick flannel nightdress. After a bit she threw me off saying I was too heavy. Her chest was a cave of thin ribs; round as a hazelnut; there was no rest there. Leaning on her I thought she might break. Like a chicken when you’ve stripped the carcass and all that’s left is a bony shell with nothing inside. Emily, my dream-sister, cannot be a mother to me. She is too thin. She might crack and shatter under my weight. I bear her down but she cannot bear me up.

  All these parts of myself I cannot show to you, dear master. You must not see them. Not legs and petticoats: I don’t mean that. I mean my need, my desperation. My desire. That’s much too heated and shameful to put on show. Swaddle my mouth therefore in shawls and scarves and the pages of prayerbooks.

  To appear before you, to be allowed to exist in your presence, I must be clean and happy. Not baring my teeth but smiling neatly like the other girls in class reciting the rules of composition and grammar to their cher professeur.

  But I’d like to steal into your house, Monsieur, steal you and steal off with you, tender morsel in my mouth; I’m the fox carrying off your chickens, you my chicken, my pet; I’ll smash your eggs and suck them I’ll suck you dry.

  Save me from this urge towards destruction, dear master. Tell me off. Tell me to behave. Only allow me to come and see you. Write to me. Allow me to believe that you receive this letter and that one day soon you will reply to

  your devoted

  Charlotte

  PART 6

  Catherine was trapped in mess. A trail of litter connected one room to another. Half-full glasses jostled in the hearth, on the edges of bookshelves. The butts of lipstick-smeared cigarettes had been tossed into the fireplace, stubbed out in the earth of potted plants, left to float, swollen and disintegrating, in wine dregs. The ashtrays were little hills of feathers, overflowing; drifts of grey flakes were caught in the creases of rucked-up rugs, or powdered across the floor. The crumbs of shattered potato crisps crunched underfoot. Stray peanuts lodged, greasy and chipped, between floorboard cracks. The air stank of stale nicotine. Plates, set down anywhere, on chair seats or on the sofa, were smeared with leftover food. Like the dirty haloes of disgraced angels; abandoned where they fell. Like dirty snow. The room was awash, as though it had recently contained a glacier, just melted with the overnight coming of spring; the ice covering was gone; it had swept out, leaving its moraine behind. Under that pure white crust was only a morass of filth.

  Adam wandered in from the hall, clutching a glass of whisky.

  —We should drink to Robert’s show. Charlie really means it, you know. Dad would have been so pleased.

  —You should drink to me as well, Catherine said: I’m the one who took him up to see the picture.

  Adam tipped back the last of his whisky. It got him to sleep better than the sleeping-pills the doctor had prescribed. Pills made you wake up feeling groggy, as though you’d been hit over the head; heavy and dry-mouthed. Whisky attacked more subtly, a golden warmth in belly and heart spreading along your veins to weaken your knees, collapse you gracefully into oblivion.

  —Charlie’s thinking of rescheduling everything, Adam said: opening with Robert’s show. Did I tell you?

  —Yes, Catherine said: you did.

  Ambling over to the fireplace and kicking a half-burned log, sending up a fan of red sparks, he irritated her by adding to the disorder. She needed nothing in the room to move. She would still it with her hands if necessary, as you kill a chicken by wringing its neck. Her fists were clenched against her sides. Now he was peering at the toppled stack of CDs. Oh God, don’t let him put any music on. That would be too much.

  She forced a calm smile onto her face.

  —You go to bed. You know I like to clear up straight away after a party. Just leave me to get on with it.

  Adam was drunk, but he stacked a tray with a wobble of empty bottles, plates and dishes, and wove with it into the kitchen. She followed with a tray of glasses.

  —You’re tired out, she insisted: it won’t take me long and I promise I don’t mind a bit.

  He kissed her. His breath smelt of wine and whisky mixed. His cheeks were already stubbly, grazing hers. He stumbled out, and she heard him beginning to climb the stairs.

  —Don’t worry if you hear any strange noises, she shouted after him: it’ll only be me.

  Sometimes at night now, Adam woke her up, jabbing her with his elbow. Quick. There it is again. D’you hear it? Catherine listened, straining her ears into the darkness. Nothing. You imagined it.

  Adam insisted the noise was Robert tramping to and fro downstairs. His characteristic tread; heavy-footed and determined. By day, if he was in the kitchen or the sitting-room, alone in the house, he heard Robert pacing to and fro overhead. Last week he had seen Robert in the back garden, dressed in his paint-spattered working clothes, peering in through the window. He mouthed through the glass that he’d come back for something he’d forgotten. After that Adam had begun keeping the curtains closed. You should believe me, he said to Catherine. Catherine had spread her hands wide, tilted them downwards, and looked at the empty air pouring off them. She repeated: you imagined it.

  Catherine opened the windows, front and back, to let out the nicotine reek. A yellow smell, the colour of Caporal cigarettes in their maize paper. Sweet, damp air blew in from the black garden. She emptied ashtrays, ran round with a broom, shook the rugs out of the back door and replaced them. The dishwasher refused to function, so she washed up by hand. Soon ranks of up-ended glasses shone wetly on the rack, and in rows on a tea-cloth on the kitchen table, winking with soap bubbles from having been too hastily rinsed. She kept remembering the look on Vinny’s face earlier that night, as she sat on the bed with Adam and tried, too obviously, not to gaze at him. With a damp rag she wiped Vinny away. She swept her into a plastic bag, which she knotted tight at the neck and chucked in the dustbin. She scoured her off the sink and rinsed her down the drain. With licked finger and thumb she briskly snuffed her out. She drowned her in bleach in the lavatory bowl of the downstairs cloakroom then flushed her away.

  She too
k a shower then crept into bed. She fitted herself along Adam’s long body, zigzag, her knees behind his, her arm curved over him, and felt his warmth. One day soon, perhaps, he’d start wanting sex again. She was supposed to wait patiently until that happened. She kissed the back of his neck. He grunted in his pit of sleep. She began writing a new chapter in her head. That black leather chair at the hairdresser’s. She would definitely do something with that. And a whip to tickle her heroine between her legs.

  * * *

  Catherine. Catherine.

  A summons. Her name shouted out. The teacher at primary school taking the register, counting her into class? No, it’s a lawyer. The prosecuting counsel. His voice is high and light. He reads aloud from a document, labels her the accused. She’s in court.

  She jerks upright in bed. Night, black as printer’s ink. She’s a character in a thriller. Someone’s writing her in, pinning her down onto the page. The words unreel in the darkness, clear as subtitles on a cinema screen. The clock marks the seconds of anxiety. Bang on four a.m. She’s been woken by a bolt of heat; like being struck by lightning. She mops her brow and cheeks with a corner of the sheet.

  Her voice comes out as no more than a squeak. Not guilty.

  Catherine wants to disappear. Thick with humidity. Made of nothing but this hot flesh, this sweat crawling over her skin like grease. She flaps the sheet under her chin, trying to trap a current of cool air. Make the memories melt off her and flow away.

  She reaches for the glass of water on the table by the bed. Careful not to bump or chink, not to wake Adam, who sleeps on by her side as though nothing is happening. But the bedroom is re-forming itself, rising around her in tiers of mahogany, she cowering at the bottom of the pit gazing up at the judge, and beside him and above him boxes of witnesses pointing their fingers and denouncing her. The heat is stifling. Water rises and rinses her brow, flows down the sides of her face. Flapping black gowns and curled horsehair wigs and red-faced men.

  Now her nose was running. She turned on her side and groped under her pillow for a handkerchief. Nothing there. She got up, felt her way to the door. In the bathroom she blew her nose on a tissue, opened the bottle of Adam’s sleeping-pills and swallowed one. Then she crept back into the bedroom, closing the door behind her with a tiny click, inching across the carpet so as to make no sound. She rolled into bed and drew the covers around herself.

  She was shivering. Adam, turned away from her, was a dark mound, face in the pillow. Snoring gently. The rasp of his breathing, like a rusty clockwork engine being wound, was a comfort. She wanted to press her face between his shoulder-blades, but feared the caress would waken him. Instead she listened to his night-time purr and laid one hand lightly against his spine.

  She tried to distract herself from anxiety by going over her planning for tomorrow. Finish clearing up. Go out, to leave Adam in peace for writing. Find dishwasher warranty and place by phone. Finish writing notes for next week’s teaching. E-mail the boys. Do the ironing. Make a start on the new chapter of the novella. Decide whether or not to get rid of Robert’s tapes completely.

  When he was on his own, in between visitors, in the hospice, he’d talked into a tape machine. Some kind of memoir, she supposed. He’d given her the tapes to take away. They’re a secret, mind. Don’t tell Adam. Not till you’ve typed it all out. This is just between you and me, sweetie. I want it to be a surprise. Promise? Unwillingly, she’d promised. She’d slung the unlabelled tapes into a shoebox and pushed it to the back of the wardrobe, where it could be forgotten, lost. Old man, old man, don’t hassle me. But perhaps she’d bury the tapes in the dustbin along with all the party rubbish. Without listening to them. Adam would never know.

  Sleep grabbed her like a jailer, frog-marching her back into the tribunal, slamming her into the dock. The voice plucked at her with impatient hands. The voice belonged to Vinny. Whether or not Catherine told herself she was wide awake, she was fretting and therefore imagining things; Vinny’s voice would not go away.

  She was addressing her as though she were continuing a conversation they had begun a long time ago. They’d been interrupted and now they had resumed. It was like being tuned into a radio station and forbidden, by some unseen power, to switch off.

  If Catherine was in the dock, Vinny was a witness for the prosecution. She was determined to speak. She wanted to put her side of the story.

  PART 7

  When we were children, cher Monsieur, Emily and I shared a room. Our beds were side by side. Summer nights, up here under the roof, were hot and airless. A dormer window above Emily’s bed meant she could see the stars when she knelt up in her welter of blankets and coverlet. She liked to keep the window open; to feel the air on her face as she was falling asleep. If we forgot to wedge the wood-framed square of mesh in place then moths whirred in. Moonlight poured through that porthole, our floor scoured to silver like a scrubbed deck, and then the white flood setting our beds afloat, rocking and bumping and we in them turning to fish. The cotton curtains, drawn back, framed the moon, a white fruit on a black plate. I used to want to eat the moon. It hung above me, one of those cherries you called coeur de pigeon. We ate them for breakfast in June, do you remember, when we went out from Brussels to the countryside and breakfasted at a farm. Milk, rolls and butter, new-laid eggs, cherries. You fed us well, Monsieur. You liked to see us eat. Emily sat on the grass, tipping up her earthenware cup, and you watched her, smiling. She was healthy then. She was thin and brown and full of energy.

  When I was little I was not clear that she was she and I was I. Night after night I tested her to find out where she ended and I began. In the darkness I could not see my sister but I knew that she was there. Whether or not I’d seen her undress or get into bed didn’t matter. The blackness of night took us into itself and altered our forms, changed us into quite other creatures. She might have become a bat and flapped back out of the window, or a mouse, skulking back down its hole. On nights that she remained herself, Emily, and I Charlotte, I waited until I could bear our separation no more. Five minutes. Two minutes. I heard her breathing, or the rustle as she turned over inside the coil of blankets and sheets. Let me in with you, I’d whisper, then slide out of my bed, bound across the strip of cold oilcloth that formed the strait between us, turn back her covers, and slip into her warmth.

  How different her bed felt from mine. Because she was in it, I suppose, taller than I was, so her indentation in the mattress a different shape. I learned her body by pressing mine into the mould she made with hers. We shared this hollowed-out place; we both fitted into it, like two almonds inside the same casing of nut, one concave and one convex. We curved, one to the other. Sometimes we lay face to face, arms around each other, and whispered to one another, her breath mixed with mine, hands pressing shoulder-blades. Sometimes she turned me over and used me as a blackboard, writing on my skin with her fingertip, while I squirmed and giggled; words for me to guess.

  My sister Emily taught me how to write and read. You didn’t need eyes for this. You didn’t need candlelight. Hands on flesh her writing implements, and my reading an intake of breath, delight at the cool movement of her flitting touch. My wish for her to go on and not stop led to understanding longer sentences; it was that simple. She traced whole stories on my back; she spelled out poems, line by line, all down my spine. When she’d finished, she twisted around, and I began. It was my turn. I wrote for her the stories of Angria. I acted them out with my hands smoothing her back, her waist. My sister: my first reader; my first audience; as I hers. Both of us writers and both of us readers, connected by the need for storytelling not to end. What happened next? And so then? Go on, go on.

  That was how the bed-plays began. Bed-plays means playing in bed, and it also means writings made in bed. Dramatic writings. Her bed for stage; our sheets for backdrop and curtains. Battles and insurrections and love-making and cutting off the heads of enemies, one by one. All achieved in the dark by two small girls. Lover means writer and reader; ye
s, that’s what it means, mon cher Monsieur.

  * * *

  But I lost my lover and so I married Arthur Nicholls. What hope was left to me? You were gone. My sister too. Both of you plucked away from me. We would never be together again. What was I to do in my loneliness? I wanted a companion. There was no-one. The silence was shrivelling me up like wisps of charred paper in the ashes of yesterday’s fire.

  Sometimes, at night, I dreamed of Emily wheeling through the cold stars, turning and turning among them as though she were now indeed one of them, as in life she always longed to be. When I woke up I would weep. She was lost to me forever. On such nights the universe was brilliant as ice, and Emily utterly distant because she belonged to it in ways I did not. She was rock and tree and snow and torrent and heather whereas I crept about, clothed in a brown frock and brown boots and hat, to sit in church stuttering psalms to wheezy organ music. Emily was buried in church, under a stone slab. But she was not there. How could she possibly be there? She belonged outside, as she had always done. Once she was warm, and felt the sun on her flesh, and when I cried in bed at night, for some childish distress, for some harsh reprimand I felt I had not deserved, she would put her arms around me and say, Now Char, now Char. Now she is one with the rushing wind and the stream and the boulders that line the stream. I do believe that. I want to believe it. She is there.

  One cold spring day, I remember, I’d been out, visiting a sick parishioner on a distant farm. I was walking home along the ridge of the moor. Suddenly I felt her with me. She was there in the wind over the stubby grass, the wind-blunted thorn trees leaning away from the white dust of the track. She was the wind and the birds calling each other and the bright line of water like a silver crack on the moor.